This book shows how to deal with the early failures that invariably plague product manufacturers whether the product be components or complete systems, electronic or mechanical devices. The text provides a basic understanding of why failure patterns appear as they do in real life and then shows how to cope with the problem on a sound engineering basis. Burn-in is used to eliminate early failures in components or systems and the book shows how to analyse and plan a burn-in procedure, balancing the needs of reliability and cost. The models that are presented are simple but they do nevertheless cover a large number of practical situations. The book is the outcome of a research project initiated at the Engineering Academy of Denmark and sponsored jointly by the Danish Council of Technology and a number of Danish manufacturing companies within the electronics and electromechanical industry. It is written primarily for the practising reliability engineer who needs to know about the techniques and benefits of performing burn-in on components, subassemblies, or complete systems. Contents

1. Introduction
2. A Model for the Basic Time-to-Failure Pattern of Components
3. The Bimodal Time-to-Failure Distribution of Systems
4. Analysis of Component and System Failure Patterns
5. Burn-in Procedures for Components or Systems without Repair
6. Burn-in Procedures for Systems with Repair
7. Acceleration of Burn-in Tests
8. Burn-in for Reliability and Economy
9. Planning and Controlling Production Burn-in of Systems

Bibliography Appendixes Index